This book is a comprehensive introduction to a dialogical perspective on language, languaging, thinking, communication and culture. It builds upon social psychology, social and dialogical philosophy (phenomenology), interactional linguistics, and humanistic ideas of thinking and communication.

Dialogical terms comprise, for example, dialogue, dialectics, dynamics, extended dialogism, external dialogue, partial holism, situations, contexts and activities, partial and partially shared understandings, participation, appropriation, and meaning-making, interpenetrations of concepts, e.g. persons and culture.

According to dialogical theory, a great deal revolves around the assumption that the making of meaning and social order in human activities and cultures is usually and initially built on interactions and relations between Self and Others. Basic properties of contributions to external dialogues are relations between initiatives and responses. Categories of responsive actions include minimal, short (“elliptical”) and expanded (“full”) responses. An important distinction is that between situated and sociohistorical contexts; we can talk about “double dialogicality” (situated vs. sociohistorical). An explanatory context theory must also distinguish between co-textual, other situation-based, and cultural (non-local) types. Pragma-semantic categories are linguistic means and situated (“participants’”) meanings; a parallel distinction is that between meaning potentials (of words and constructions) and message potentialities. (of situated utterances).

Communication comprises cognitive, emotional and volitional aspects, and involves partial (and partially shared) understandings, and relations of power and respect. Utterances are characterised by responsivity, addressivity, incrementation, and relatively frequent re(tro)constructions of ongoing processes.

The book includes separate sections on evolution and ontogenesis, dialogue and thinking, individual and collective aspects of language and languaging, activity types, multimodality of utterances, conditions production, reception and understanding of utterances, and also some traditional – but partially misguided – ideas in the theorisation of language and communication. This includes a discussion of the “written language bias in linguistics” which is a historical feature of the language sciences despite their shift from “practical” to “theoretical” concerns.

All chapters are designed to highlight dialogical aspects. The last two chapters contain a discussions of general dialogical ideas as well as of phenomenology as an overarching framework. The differences between natural-science and humanistic approaches to the mind and mental capacities of man conclude the book.

Several arguments build upon earlier work by the author, such as Linell (1998, 2005, 2009) and numerous papers such as Linell & Marková (1993) and Linell (2016, 2020a, 2021a). A list of major sources of inspiration is given in Appendix 1.

Over a long professional lifetime, Ragnar Rommetveit contributed to numerous disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, reflecting discussions in global social science and his own unending quest to understand social and individual life. His remarkable career and impact can be outlined in terms of four main phases. The first involved general social psychology in the 1950s and was reflected in Social Norms and Roles (1953/1955). In the second phase during the 1960s and 1970s, he focused on language-related psycholinguistic research leading to publications such as his 1968 volume Words, Meanings and Messages. The third phase came in the 1970s and 1980s and was motivated by his critique of formal linguistics and resulted in his short, magisterial 1974 volume On Message Structure. The fourth phase between 1980 and 2010 focused on "dialogism," giving rise to works such as his 1992 article "Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communication." Along with his intellectual accomplishments, Rommetveits brilliance and generosity inspired students and colleagues at the University of Oslo, as well as from around the world. His capacity to engage with others in unending mediations on communication and mental life ranks among his most important legacies.

This chapter discusses the concept of intersubjectivity and its relation to dialogue. It argues that intersubjectivity is hardly a monolithic notion, but rather a family of related concepts, and elaborates on various forms and aspects of intersubjectivity in both wider philosophical contexts and more local empirical contexts. Many scholars have argued that intersubjectivity necessarily presupposes subjectivity as a more basic notion, a position which is associated with classical phenomenology. Intersubjectivity is a multi-faceted phenomenon, and a multi-ambiguous term. It is not a specific, easily localisable phenomenon, nor a precise descriptive notion. In a truly dialogical approach to human sense-making, interactivities are arguably more basic than intersubjectivities. As regards intersubjectivity, partial rather than complete types are the canonical cases. Both interactivity and intersubjectivity can take many forms. Intersubjectivity, imbued as it is with linguistic aspects, should be seen as a central dimension of being in the world.

The present chapter deals with reactive constructions in Swedish and German, especially with two constructions which will be called x-och/und-x (i.e. x-and-x) and 'double initial auxiliaries' (= DIA) constructions. As reactive constructions we define constructions involving the speaker's repetition of an expression x used in a prior utterance by another or by the speaker him/herself. This first segment is followed by a negotiation of the situated meaning of x. The function is to react to or against the previous speaker's way of expressing him/herself, his/her use of the expression x.

Our observations confirm a general view of online languaging ( = 'language use'), that utterances are incrementally built. Moreover, our data show that reactive constructions are evidence for a dynamic and dialogical conception of language and languaging, including grammatical constructions.

Per Linell har, tillsammans med medarbetare och kolleger, arbetat under lång tid med samtal, särskilt sådana som hör hemma i institutioner och professioner och deras kontakter med klienter. I de två volymerna om Samtalskulturer ligger fokus främst på sådana institutionella samtal, men böck~rna ger även ett samhälleligt förankrat perspektiv på samtal och kommunikation i allmänhet. Samtalskulturer vänder sig både till samhällsvetare med intresse för interaktionen mellan människor och tillspråkvetare med specialisering på språkets och språkandets roll i samhällslivet.

Per Linell disputerade i allmän språkvetenskap (Uppsala, 1974) och har varit professor vid Linköpings universitet, först vid tema Kommunikation 1981-2005 och därefter i språk och kultur 2006-2011. Han har fått internationellt erkännande för sina bidrag till "dialogiska" teorier om människors meningsskapande i kommunikation och tänkande. Sådana teorier betonar hur man som sarntalare, författare, tänkare och praktiker är beroende av andra personer, av kontexter och interaktioner. På detta område har Linell publicerat böcker som Approaching Dialogue (Amsterdam, 1998) och Rethinking Language, Mind and World Dialogically (Charlotte, NC, 2009). I boken The Written Language Bias in Linguistics (London, 2005) analyserar han utförligt skriftspråksorienteringen i språkvetenskapen. Han har arbetat med samtal av många olika slag och analyserat deras funktioner i samhället. Det gäller särskilt samtal i institutioner och professioner (Samtalskulturer, Linköping, 2011). I boken Språkande har han samlat olika uppsatser om grammatiken i verkliga yttranden i samtal.

The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages, representing a variety of interactions: private and public, written and spoken, historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points, goals and aims, engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent

Talk in safety-critical activities displays features that distinguish it from both ordinaryconversations as well as from other institutional talk, but it also shares some features with these.Formality and informality are both interactionally accomplished phenomena, but they are shapedthrough different sources. Safety rules and pre-printed forms constitute two sources offormalization, dictating how to carry out communicative exchanges in certain types of situations,irrespective of the more specific circumstances in individual cases. Sources of informalization arethe participants’ need to adapt to situation-specific communicative needs, but also, ironicallyenough, routinization itself.In contemporary literature, safety-critical talk tends to be treated either in terms of strictadherence to a formal code, where all informalities are seen as potential sources of accidents, orinformalization is treated as natural and inevitable, focusing on routine conditions where they areapparently harmless. In this paper, based upon detailed analysis of telephone calls between traindrivers and dispatchers on the Swedish railway network, we propose a middle ground. We suggest acontingent theory of formalization, identifying four main types of informalizations, as well asdiscussing when and why they may be harmless and when they may be detrimental.

This article is a study of how the participation status of asylum-seeking children is interactively constructed in interpreter-mediated asylum hearings. We have undertaken a discourse analysis of 50 non-repair side-sequences from 26 hearings with Russian-speaking, asylum-seeking children in Sweden. A side-sequence is here defined as a monolingual sequence conducted in only one of the languages involved in the interviews. It involves the interpreter and only one of the primary interlocutors. In this article, four extracts are chosen for a micro-analysis in order to elucidate how interpreters can challenge asylum-seeking children’s participant statuses. We show that the right of the child to make his or her voice heard can be challenged, especially when the interpreters exclude, distort, discredit and guide the voices of the children, which is often done with the tacit approval of caseworkers.

Trust, distrust and conflict between social groups have existed throughout the history of humankind, although their forms have changed. Using three main concepts: culture, representation and dialogue, this book explores and re-thinks some of these changes in relation to concrete historical and contemporary events. Part I offers a symbolic and historical analysis of trust and distrust while Parts II and III examine trust, distrust and conflict in specific events including the Cyprus conflict, Estonian collective memories, coping with HIV/AIDS in China, Swedish asylum seekers, the Cuban missile crisis and Stalinist confessions. With an impressive array of international contributors the chapters draw on a number of key concepts such as self and other, ingroup and outgroup, contact between groups, categorization, brinkmanship, knowledge, beliefs and myth.  Trust and Conflict offers a fresh perspective on the problems that arise from treating trust, distrust and conflict as simplified indicators. Instead, it proposes that human and social sciences can view these phenomena within the complex matrix of interacting perspectives and meta-perspectives that characterise the social world. As such it will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and lecturers of human and social sciences especially social psychology, sociology, political science and communication studies.